Manhattan Beach Page 4

  “How do I buy time with an interfering wop?” Dunellen smoldered.

  “Give him enough to keep him quiet,” Eddie said. “Keep him satisfied. Then look for a way out.”

  He was aware of talking to himself as much as Dunellen—of talking about Dunellen. His old friend had moved very close, and Eddie was enveloped in a sour smell of the pickled onions he liked to suck. A corkscrew of nausea gyred through him.

  “Some good advice, Ed,” Dunellen said gruffly.

  “Glad to help.”

  “You look after yourself.”

  Dunellen turned his chair away. In his cockeyed state, Eddie failed at first to perceive that he was being dismissed without the promised pay—punished for Dunellen’s show of weakness. On the beach, it had been the same: Eddie yanked Dunellen by the hair onto the sand, where he lay keening and puking seawater for quite a while before he dried his tears and sauntered away. It was the other boy, Bart Sheehan, who had lifted Eddie into the air and kissed both his cheeks. But Eddie wasn’t fooled by Dunellen then or now; he knew the bully would protect him after that. And so it had been: the stronger the bond, the more flagrant Dunellen’s disregard. He loved Eddie deeply.

  Dunellen pointedly turned his attention to several bookmakers who’d come to kiss his ring, now and then peeling bills from a roll and pushing them, with practiced intimacy, into fists, waving away murmured thanks. Eddie remained stubbornly seated. He waited even knowing he would go home empty-handed. In the byzantine calculus of their relations, waiting longer and receiving nothing would likely mean something extra from Dunellen down the line.

  When he noticed Eddie still there, Dunellen scowled. Then his displeasure relented, and he asked softly during a lull, “How is the little one?”

  “The same. As she always will be.”

  “I pray for her every day.”

  Eddie knew that he did. Dunellen was deeply devout, attending six-thirty morning Mass at Guardian Angel Church, sometimes without having slept, and returning for a second Mass at five. He carried a rosary in each pocket.

  “I should pray for her more myself,” Eddie said.

  “Sometimes it’s harder to ask God for your own.”

  Eddie was touched by this truth. He felt his intimacy with Dunellen, deep and primitive, as if their blood ran through each other’s veins. “There’s a chair I need to buy for her,” he said. “It costs three hundred eighty dollars.”

  Dunellen looked flabbergasted. “Are they loony?”

  “They have the chair,” Eddie said, “and she needs it.”

  He hadn’t intended to ask his friend for the money, but now he felt a sudden rise of hope that Dunellen might offer it. He had it, God knew. Might easily have the sum on him now, in his mammoth roll—warmed, like the rosaries, by his fierce body heat.

  “Nat could help you with that,” Dunellen said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “I’d have a word, buy you as much time as you need. Take it right off your pay if that would help any.”

  It took Eddie a moment, in his half-stupor, to absorb Dunellen’s meaning. He was sending Eddie to the loan shark. And judging by the soft look in his eyes, Dunellen regarded the steer as an act of charity.

  Eddie took great care not to react. “I’ll think about it,” he said mildly. If he remained at Sonny’s another minute, Dunellen would read his displeasure and punish him for it. “ ’Night, Dunny,” he said, sliding the Duesenberg’s key across the table. “Thanks.”

  They shook, and Eddie left the bar and stood outside for several minutes, waiting for the icy wind off the Hudson River to slap him sober. But he found himself staggering toward the IRT, drunker than he’d realized, and had to lean against Sonny’s cold brick exterior. The groan and creak of ropes from the docks reached him like a grinding of teeth. He smelled rusty chains, planks sodden with fish oil: the very stench of corruption, it seemed to him now. Dunellen was beloved among the rank and file for handing bills around, but Eddie knew he controlled the shylocks, Nat included, taking his cut from the interest they collected, setting his loogans on debtors who failed to pay. A word from Dunellen and the hiring boss would choose a debtor for a day’s work, so payments to the shylock could be deducted from his wages. The deeper you sank, the more fully theirs you became, the harder they worked to preserve you.

  Ours, Dunellen had said. Our piers.

  Eddie lurched to the curb and retched copiously onto the street. Then he wiped his mouth and looked around, relieved to find the block empty.

  He was aware of having reached an end. He shut his eyes and remembered today: the beach, the cold, the excellent lunch. A white tablecloth. Brandy. He thought of the chair. But it wasn’t just the chair that had driven him to Dexter Styles: it was a restless, desperate wish for something to change. Anything. Even if the change brought a certain danger. He’d take danger over sorrow every time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  Two evenings each week, a charitable lady came to the New York Catholic Protectory and read aloud after supper from Treasure Island, The Arabian Nights, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and other tales of exotic adventure. As she looked out from the lectern at the swath of boys, Eddie tried to picture what she saw: row upon row of folded hands (as required when they’d finished eating), scores of faces interchangeable as pennies. The biggest, the ugliest, the sweetest might stand out (DeSoto; O’Brien; Macklemore, with his tiny angel’s face), but not Eddie Kerrigan. His only noteworthy traits were an ability to slip through doors locked only with a chain and shimmy up streetlamp poles like a monkey. He could do accents but was too shy to show them off. He’d once stayed underwater longer than two minutes in Eastchester Bay.

  His father had brought him here at age four, after his mother died of typhus. At that time, the protectory was still in the town of Van Nest, Westchester, but by the time Eddie was old enough to care, Van Nest had been absorbed by the East Bronx. A separate set of girls’ buildings lay across Unionport Road, complete with an identical pond—but whether the girls were as adept at scooping wary, sulking carp into their hands, Eddie never knew. Brianne had gone to her mother’s people in New Jersey, her own mother having died back in Ireland. His father would visit early on, bringing Eddie with him to the races, then a saloon. Eddie remembered little of these outings beyond clinging to his father’s hand and trying, in short pants, to match his furious pace as he wove among horse carts and trolleys.

  Lying in the vast dormitory, hearing his breath melt into the collective sigh of so many boys asleep, Eddie was shamed by his own meagerness: narrow hips; a sharp, unremarkable face; hair like dirty straw. Even more than the orphans’ annual excursion to the circus, he thirsted for the moment each month when the protectory barber’s hands would touch his scalp briefly, indifferently, yet capable of soothing him almost to sleep. He was of no more consequence than an empty cigarette packet. At times the brusque mass of everything that was not him seemed likely to crush Eddie into dust the way he crushed the dried-out moths that collected in piles on the protectory windowsills. At times he wanted to be crushed.

  By nine or ten, the boys were expected, after lessons, to earn their pocket money at one of the myriad occupations advertised with BOY WANTED signs: delivering messages and packages; sealing boxes in one of the many Bronx piano factories. The more enterprising boys sold gum or buttons or candy at Van Nest Railway Station, working up sales pitches in groups of two or three involving songs and dance steps. Boys were watched closely near the protectory, everyone in the neighborhood aware that these were the very same boys who swiped caramels from their jars and sweet potatoes from their pushcarts. Eddie was not exempt from this thievery; no one wanted to be empty-handed when the spoils were divided. But he felt degraded by the crimes he was moved to commit, soiled by the suspicion that followed. He looked for work in other neighborhoods, clutching the rear of the West Farms Road trolley and riding it across the Bronx River past Crotona Park, where the houses were stone and brick. Although visibly poor in his o
rphanage-made breeches and shoes, when away from the scrum Eddie found he was able to straighten his spine and peer directly into the eyes of whomever he addressed.

  One afternoon in early fall, when Eddie was eleven, an elderly gentleman in a wheeled chair called out to him as he crossed Clermont Park toward a bakery on Morris Avenue he’d been making deliveries for. The man asked to be rolled into the sun. He wore a double-breasted suit and a crisp orange feather in his hatband. Eddie pushed the gentleman’s chair as directed, then fetched him a cigar and a Mirror from a newsstand on Belmont. He hovered nearby, awaiting dismissal, as the man read and smoked. At last, sensing he’d been forgotten, he declared himself, striving for the orotund speech of the charitable ladies’ reading voices: “Alas, sir, the sun has forsaken you. Would you care to be moved yet again?”

  The old man met his eyes, perplexed. “Can you play at cards?” he asked.

  “I haven’t any deck.”

  “What games?”

  “Knuckles. Blackjack. Chuck-a-luck. Stutz. Poker.” Eddie tossed out names as though pitching pennies—then knew, with poker, that he’d struck. The old man rustled under the plaid blanket covering his knees and handed Eddie a brand-new deck. “Seven-card stud,” he said. “You deal. Honestly.”

  They introduced themselves and moved to a sunny bench so Eddie could sit down. They placed bets using small sticks he collected and broke into equal lengths, and their table was the blanket pulled taut across Mr. De Veer’s shrunken thighs. The cards felt like glass. Eddie smelled their newness and had an urge to lick them, or slide them over his cheeks. He lost every hand, but he hardly cared—the sensation of those cards, of sitting in the sun, was transporting. Eventually, the gentleman fished a heavy silver watch from his pocket and announced that his sister would be coming soon to fetch him. He gave Eddie a nickel. “But I lost,” Eddie said. Mr. De Veer replied that he was paying for the gift of Eddie’s time and companionship, and asked him to come again the next afternoon.

  That night Eddie lay sleepless, his whole body thrumming with certainty that something grand and new had begun. And he was right, in a way, for much of what had happened in the years since could be traced to that acquaintance. “Two men at poker ain’t much of a game,” Mr. De Veer told him on their second meeting, and proposed to give Eddie a stake to play as his proxy in a game where he was known. But his imprimatur had less weight than Mr. De Veer had hoped, and Eddie was turned away brusquely from the first several games he tried, once by a lady in curlers who swatted him with a broom. At last, in a cigar store across from the freight yard, he was grudgingly admitted by Sid, a chain-smoker of Old Golds who blinked at Eddie through a cumulus lazing under his green visor brim.

  In the weeks that followed, weather permitting, Eddie joined Sid’s game for an hour and a quarter—less, if he lost his stake before that time had elapsed. Afterward, he returned to Mr. De Veer and relayed the action card by card, bet by bet, a feat of memorization and recall that Eddie improved at with time. The old gentleman hung on his descriptions, interjecting at each error—“No, a high card won’t do against Polsky, he can’t bluff. You’ll lose that one”—until Eddie began withholding outcomes until the end in order to further his employer’s suspense and joy. On the rare occasions when Eddie came out ahead, Mr. De Veer gave him half the winnings. When he lost, he merely returned what was left. Eddie could have lied, of course—said he’d lost when he’d actually won, kept all the profits, but this thought occurred to him only in the negative: as something other boys might have done.

  Mr. De Veer had been a “sporting man,” which apparently meant a gambler and a connoisseur of horses. He’d played at Canfield’s and the Metropole Hotel against Goulds, Fisks, and Vanderbilts, before “do-gooders” like Reverend Parkhurst had hounded the best places out of business and closed the race track at Brighton Beach. Gentleman gamblers were a thing of the past, he told Eddie bitterly, drummed out by gangsters and crooks like Arnold Rothstein, the young sheenie who won by cheating. “Don’t ever cheat, not even once,” he warned Eddie, regarding him through faded eyes fringed with silver lashes. “Cheating is like a girl’s maidenhead. Doesn’t matter if she’s done it once or a hundred times; she’s ruined just the same.”

  These words lodged in Eddie’s ears with the preternatural weight of a truth he’d already known. Cheating was a way of life at the protectory, but Eddie was different, had always been. Mr. De Veer saw that difference in him. He taught Eddie ways to spot loaded dice, crooked decks, signs of collusion between apparent strangers—anything that undermined the mystical activity of Lady Luck.

  Mr. De Veer had a Civil War injury, but it was his “bum ticker” that had confined him to the chair two years before, and to the care of his maiden sister, Miss De Veer, who had put an immediate end to his gaming. She claimed it had ruined his health, but he suspected she’d designs on his military pension to augment her collection of porcelain dolls, which already numbered in the hundreds. One afternoon, having just resumed after a winter suspension, Eddie returned late from a card game. Mr. De Veer ordered him away harshly. Wounded, Eddie watched from inside the park as a heavyset lady in a wide-brimmed black hat moved toward Mr. De Veer with boxy determination. The old gentleman looked bowed and frail in her presence, and Eddie understood that he was afraid of his sister.

  “Haven’t you a timepiece?” he asked Eddie the next afternoon. When Eddie admitted he hadn’t one, the gentleman unclipped his watch chain. “Use that,” he said, pressing a silver pocket watch into Eddie’s palm. It was heavy and engraved.

  “I can’t, sir,” Eddie stammered. “They’ll think I—”

  “It is a loan, not a gift,” Mr. De Veer said shortly.

  In late May, Mr. De Veer failed to appear four days in succession. On the fourth, a Friday, Eddie waited all afternoon, checking the silver pocket watch at one-minute intervals. At last he entered Topping Avenue, from which Miss De Veer had emerged, and approached some girls carving potsy squares in the dust. “That old man in the chair, have you seen him?” he asked. To which a tiny girl with faded yellow braids said shrilly, “They took him in his coffin up to heaven.”

  “Or hell. We don’t know his heart!” said a crafty-looking older girl, and all of them laughed at Eddie without mercy, exactly as his own scrum mocked any unknown child who bumbled into its midst. He felt the pocket watch against his thigh and knew he must find Miss De Veer, to return it. But that thought drew an internal rebuke: No! Not to her, and Eddie remembered the porcelain dolls and began walking back toward Clermont Park, keeping his pace at a saunter until he passed the iceman’s dray, at which point he broke into a run. He’d turned twelve, tall and scrawny, fastened together with muscles like leather thongs. As he sprinted past the old Clermont casino and the elevated tracks, he realized that by maintaining this headlong pace, he could stay just ahead of the knowledge that he would not see Mr. De Veer again. He charged through Crotona Park and across the Bronx River, startling boys fishing on a bridge; he careened through empty farms divided into ghostly future streets, and finally across the railway tracks to what once was the faded town of Van Nest. In a state of near collapse, he gasped toward the Unionport nickelodeon, where the protectory boys were lined up for the cowboy flicker. It was an ordinary day. His friends knew nothing of Mr. De Veer. Eddie slumped in among them, and while they hissed and bawled at the train robbers with their devious mustaches, he allowed himself to sob. The boys’ boisterous oblivion absorbed the racket of his grief and finally blunted the grief itself. Nothing had changed or disappeared.

  After that, Eddie stayed close to his protectory brothers even when he drifted from them. He was the one who came and went, whom they never could quite figure, and their willingness to accept this partial version of him increased Eddie’s tenderness toward them. They grew up and went their ways: several of the older ones to the Great War, where Paddy Cassidy died at Rheims; and a great many to the West Side docks, where they became stevedores or laborers (depending on how much the
y drank), police, saloonkeepers, aldermen, union officials, and outright hoods. It was possible to occupy more than one of these roles on the waterfront, and many did. Bart Sheehan, the boy whose life Eddie had saved along with Dunellen’s, managed to complete high school, then college, then law school: drastic achievements that led to his being discussed in the same hushed tones as angelic Kevin Macklemore, sliced in two by a loose railway car on Eleventh Avenue. Sheehan worked for the state attorney’s office now, although Eddie hadn’t seen him in many years. Dunellen had it from the kite—a web of rumor and innuendo more omniscient than the Shamrock—that Bart was investigating the Wop Syndicate. Eddie suspected this was wishful thinking on Dunny’s part.

  To the bewilderment of his friends, Eddie gravitated to vaudeville, where he danced, sang badly for comic effect, hung like a bat from theater rafters, and tricked his body into Houdini-like escapes. He booked a season with the Follies, where he fell in love with a chorus girl newly escaped (as Agnes put it) from a barley farm in Minnesota. After they married, he managed a theater and studied to be a stockbroker. He planned to buy a seat on the Curb Exchange, which was more affordable than the New York Exchange. Not that money was a problem. Eddie had found his perfect game of chance and was buying stocks on the margin, selling only to buy more—and to acquire the trappings appropriate to his new wealth. He bought Agnes a Russian sable fur and a string of pearls from Black, Starr & Frost. The kitchen sink of their Fifth Avenue rental was afloat with Prince de Monaco cigarettes they’d stubbed out into unfinished meals in their rush to the bedroom. Eddie hired a maid to clean up in the afternoons. He engaged a tailor and ordered suits from England and bought champagne for Agnes and a dozen others at the Heigh-Ho and the Moritz after her shows. He’d no idea how to be rich—so little, in fact, that he thought he was rich. They brought Anna to parties and set her to sleep on mountains of fur coats. Lydia was different, of course. They hired an Irish laundress to care for her in the evenings while she did their washing.